2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)
An IoT Approach to Vehicle Accident
Detection, Reporting, and Navigation
Elie Nasr, Elie Kfoury, David Khoury
Computer Science Department
American University of Science and Technology
Beirut, Lebanon
enasr@aust.edu.lb, ekfoury@aust.edu.lb, dkhoury@aust.edu.lb
Abstract— One particular concern that Public Safety
Organizations (PSO) must account for whilst engaging in many
activities is decreasing the effect of vehicle accidents, aiding as
many injured people as possible and providing 24/7 on the spot
rescue. The Red Cross humanitarian organization is one of the
most known PSOs to be present on-site whenever an accident or
a disaster takes place. However, some of the rescue teams face
difficulty in reaching the injured people to due late alerts and
insufficient information of the specific accident location. The
advent of the mobile phone and Internet of Things (IoT)
industries reshaped the way people communicate and brought a
paradigm shift to public and private services [1]. This ever-
evolving technology marked the beginning of new era affecting
the lives of people and various businesses. This paper conveys a
smart and reliable IoT system solution which instantly notifies
the PSO headquarter whenever an accident takes place and
pinpoints its geographic coordinates on the map. When an
accident takes place, a shock sensor detects it. Then, an algorithm
is applied to process the sensor signal and send the geographic
location along with some ancillary information to the PSO
headquarter, indicating accident occurrence. This is a promising
system expected to aid in the tedious rescuing process by
reporting in a matter of seconds the location of an accident, the
passengers injured, blood types, thus lowering death’s rates. The
geographical data collected from this system could be relied upon
as admissible evidence or indicator of the road state and
conditions.
Keywords— Public safety organization, accident, rescue, IoT,
sensor, geographical coordinates.
I. INTRODUCTION
According to the Association for Safe International Road
Travel (ASIRT), nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes
each year, 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Road crashes
cost USD $518 billion globally, costing individual countries
from 1-2% of their annual GDP. Currently, Road traffic
crashes rank as the 9th leading cause of death and account for
2.2% of all deaths globally. Unless action is taken, road traffic
injuries are predicted to become the fifth leading cause of
death by 2030 [2].
The challenges imposed to local PSOs in saving human lives
resulting from vehicles accidents have become a crucial
concern due to the huge aforementioned number of departed
people. As far as many injured could lose their lives, and since
no on-site medical assistance has been provided promptly as a
result of: (1) late accident reporting, (2) inaccurate geographic
location, and (3) lack of injured medical information, the need
for automated and intelligent mobile solution tackling this
burden becomes a must.
978-1-5090-5281-3/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
The current existing solutions that provide assistance to
passengers in case of vehicle accident occurrence are mainly
concerned with user interaction after the incident happened.
Those mobile solutions require that the injured must launch
the app and request help manually and that would not be
possible if he/she is under critical or serious non-vital
situation. The situation becomes even worse if passengers
went under unconscious state.
Our proposed solution is a smart IoT system consisting of
architecture, design, and implementation. This system requires
no user interaction during or after the accident; consequently,
it provides instant automated vehicle accident detection and
reporting. This method is applicable for any vehicle used in
transportation and mainly for cars accidents. The primary
users of this solution are the public safety organizations rescue
teams (like Red Cross, Emergency Management Agencies,
Law Enforcement Agencies, Fire Departments, Rescue
Squads, and Emergency Medical Services, etc…).
The main contributions of this paper are: (a) Developing a
new smart IoT solution which helps the community in
reducing the death rate resulting from vehicle accidents. (b)
Ensuring that no passenger (injured) intervention is required
during or after the accident. (c) Transmitting automatically the
basic medical information needed by the rescue teams to the
PSO headquarter. (d) Collecting geographical data which can
be fed to a data mining engine to extract roads conditions, and
to generate descriptive statistics reports about vehicle
accidents. (e) Implementing a navigation system to find the
closest rescue team to the crash.
This paper starts with descriptive statistics about car accidents
delivered by ASIRT, the challenges imposed to local PSOs in
saving human lives resulting from car accidents. Sections II,
III, IV, and V describe the related work, the proposed method,
design and architecture, and implementation consecutively.
Sections VI and VII expose results, conclusions, and future
work.
II. RELATED WORK
This section overlooks similar existing solutions and examines
their advantages and disadvantages.
Auto Accident App, developed by PlatinumPeak LLC [3], is a
mobile phone application to offer free, assistance to accident
victims. It provides one-button access to emergency personnel
and step-by-step guidance through the information gathering
 2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)

process to ensure that no critical information or evidence is

missed. The main disadvantage is that it serves only as a form HQ: Headquarter
of manual reporting about the accident after it is being taken
place. Hence, it doesn’t really provide any form of rescue for
the passengers.
Auto Accident App, developed by the Murphy Battista [4], is a
useful application for individuals who commonly or even
occasionally find themselves behind the wheel of a vehicle. It
features time saving forms that allow users to clearly collect
accident information. Not being automated is considered a
drawback of this application.
Accident Report, developed by Dr. Apps [5], lets you create an
accident report (a PDF file) in a simple and organized way, as
required by insurance companies and the police, without
missing important details during an accident situation. The
main disadvantage of this app is that it focuses on reporting
and doesn’t provide any sense of rescue.
All the solutions lack an automated smart approach to accident
detection, reporting and navigation. This paper proposes a new
method which overcomes the above stated applications’
weaknesses.
III. METHOD
In this section, we elucidate our proposed system at a high
level scope. The system is composed of the following phases:
(a) Vehicle registration and preparation, (b) Passengers’
registration, (c) Monitoring accidents through a web interface Fig. 1 – System Flowchart
located in the PSO headquarter.
Monitoring Accidents: When a passenger gets in the car and
Vehicle Registration and Preparation: This phase deals with
taps the Near Field Communication (NFC) handheld device
the process of vehicle registration. The vehicle’s owner must
(mobile phone), the passenger’s ID and the vehicle’s ID are
prepare the vehicle for this system by installing the IoT
transmitted and stored into the headquarter’s database (see
device. After installing the device, the owner gives the Vehicle
Fig. 1). Consequently, the database server establishes the
ID to the operator responsible for vehicles registration in the
mapping between the pre-registered personal information and
headquarter’s database. This would lead the PSO to recognize
the passenger’s ID. As a result, the headquarter can recognize
that the registered vehicle satisfies the pre-conditions to be
exactly the information of the passenger inside the vehicle.
integrated in the system.
This process can be applied to all passengers in the car. The
The IoT device encompasses four modular components: shock
IoT Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication protocol
sensor, GPS, NFC reader, and cellular IoT. Those combined
can be used as an alternative to NFC, to signal the presence of
modules altogether spontaneously notify the rescue
the passenger inside the vehicle.
organization headquarter whenever an accident takes place,
In case of vehicle’s accident, the airbag, or any shock
pinpoint the exact location, and recognize the passengers
detection mechanism triggers the shock sensor and
inside the vehicle on the headquarter map. The triggered
consequently a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request
sensor signal reports the vehicle’s identifier along with the
alerting the occurrence of an accident and its geographical
accident’s location which appear on a web-based interface in
location is sent to the server. Since the server has previously
the rescue center. This enables the rescue teams to respond
recognized the passengers inside the vehicle, it can now spot
immediately.
the passengers that are in danger.
Passengers’ Registration: The mobile application aims at
A rescue team can then be sent immediately to the
providing a one-time only registration form for passengers’
acknowledged location carrying out appropriate medical
personal data. The personal data include: (a) Full name, (b)
support since pre-medical info have already been identified by
Blood type, (c) Phone number, (d) Email, (e) Medical history,
headquarter’s operator.
(f) Date of birth, (g) Reference phone number.
The whole record of passenger’s information is uploaded to
the headquarter’s database once the registration process is
complete.
 2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)
IV. DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE
The below system architecture is the conceptual model that
defines the structure, behavior, and more views of our
proposed system.
Fig. 2 – Registration Phase Architectural Diagram
The preparation/registration phase discussed earlier is
illustrated in detail in Fig 2. The operator registers the vehicle
using its vehicle ID through a web interface connected to the
database server. As a result, the Vehicle table in the database
now comprises records pertaining to all registered vehicles.
On the other hand, the passenger registers himself/herself on
the server through the corresponding mobile interface. This
would make a passenger eligible to get into any equipped
vehicle and benefit from the rescue facilities provided by the
system.
Fig. 3 – Monitoring Phase Architectural Diagram
The monitoring phase discussed in section III is illustrated in
Fig 3. When the user taps the NFC enabled device (mobile
phone) to the IoT node, an HTTP request holding the
passenger’s ID and the vehicle’s ID, is sent through the IoT
cellular network to the application/database servers. If a
passenger decides to leave the car, he must tap again the NFC
enabled device for the record to be removed from the
database. Another alternative could be to store the information
locally in a memory, thus, reducing the number of transactions
on the server.
On the server side, a table containing the current trips is
maintained. Each trip consists of its passengers and the
vehicle’s ID.
In case of accident, another HTTP request containing the
vehicle’s ID and the GPS coordinates (longitude and latitude)
is sent to the server in which all records’ attributes are stored
in the database and inserted to an XML file simultaneously
(see Fig. 4).
Technically, the webpage is reading asynchronously from the
XML file the child entries “marker”, and updating the map
without having to refresh the page repetitively.
Fig. 4 – XML File Containing Current Accidents
While reading the XML file, a pin pops up on the map
indicating the location of the accident.
When the operator browses the map, locates and clicks on the
pin, a popup window is displayed, showing all passengers’
information. This allows the rescue team to prepare the
required medication, treatments, and toolkits beforehand.
V. IMPLEMENTATION
Hardware Components
In our implementation we have used an IoT device containing
different components and modules as well as communications
capability. The main components of this device are:
1. Shock sensor
Shock sensor can be integrated in various ways to match the
vehicle requirements. It could be activated by vibration or
triggered by highly effective safety system airbag. This airbag
system contains several components and mechanism which all
work together to ensure the physical integrity of the
passengers to the highest degree [6]. The sensitivity of the
employed sensor is adjusted to meet the standards adopted in
safety airbag systems.
2. Global Positioning System (GPS)
GPS navigation is a component that accurately calculates
geographical location by receiving information from GPS
satellites. [7] The SKM53 GPS module device is used to send
to server the exact vehicle location.
 2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)

Fig. 5 – IoT Device Components Fig. 7 illustrates the rescue teams’ distributions and the
calculated distances to accident location.
3. NFC Reader
Near field communication (NFC) is a set of communication
protocols that enable two electronic devices, one of which is
usually a portable device such as a smartphone, to establish
communication by bringing them within 4 cm (2 in) of each
other (tapping) [8].
An NFC reader is used to identify each passenger by detecting
his/her ID. Then the IoT device sends and matches this ID with
the corresponding remote database entry.
4. Cellular IoT Rescue Team

It is required to implement cellular IoT 3rd Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP) technologies: Extended coverage
Global System for Mobile communication (ECGSM), Long
Term Evolution (LTE), Long Term Evolution Machine to
Machine LTE-M, and the new radio access technology
Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) specifically tailored to form an
attractive solution for emerging low power wide area (LPWA)
applications. [9]
As for the higher layers in the IoT protocol stack, the emerged
protocols, the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) over
User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Datagram Transport Layer
Security (DTLS) can be used to overcome the limitations of the
IoT devices’ constraints.
Our system uses the cellular 3G module to establish all kind of
wireless communications from and to the server.
Software Components
The mobile application is built using Android TM Operating
System. Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is used for server-side
scripting, Raspberry Pi open-source prototyping platform for
data and signal processing. In addition, a near field
communication (NFC) component is used to read the user’s
data from the mobile. The Raspberry Pi board was
programmed using the Python programming language. A GPS
component is used to send the exact location of the vehicle
that had the accident. Finally, MySQL is used as the Database
Management System (DBMS).
Navigation
In our proposed system, a navigation mechanism is
implemented using the Haversine function to determine all
distances between the accident location and all widespread
rescue teams. The Haversine formula is an equation important
in navigation, giving great-circle distances between two points
on a sphere from their longitudes and latitudes. [10]
Accident Location
Fig. 7 – Points Distribution Example Scenario
For any two points on a sphere, the Haversine of the central
angle between them is given by
hav ( ) = hav (φ2 – φ1) + cos(φ1) cos(φ2) hav(λ2 – λ1)
where
hav is the Haversine function:
ɵ ɵ
hav (ɵ) = sin2 ( ) =
d is the distance between the two points (along a great circle
of the sphere; see spherical distance),
r is the radius of the sphere,
φ1, φ2: latitude of point 1 and latitude of point 2, in radians
λ1, λ2: longitude of point 1 and longitude of point 2, in
radians
The list of all calculated distances is sorted in ascending order
to determine the second nearest rescue team whenever the
former team is not available. (see Fig. 6)
A push notification of the accident’s location is sent to the
closest available rescue team which can now use the Google
Map service to determine the shortest route to destination.
VI. RESULTS
This section shows a simulation of some important features
implemented in our system. (1) On the headquarter side, Fig.6
illustrates a pin instructing the occurrence of an accident.

Fig. 6 - Pseudocode for Determining the Nearest Point Fig. 8 – Detecting Accident
 2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)
The map also shows the geographical coordinates (longitude,
latitude) of the accident location. (2) When the operator clicks
on the pin, a popup window is displayed, showing all
passengers’ information. This allows the rescue team to
prepare the required medication, treatments, and toolkits
beforehand as shown in Fig. 9.
Fig. 9 – List of Passengers and their Information
(3) In Fig. 9, when the operator press on the “+ Coming”
button, a new popup windows is displayed showing a sorted
list of all rescue teams along with the calculated distances to
accident location (see Fig. 10).
Fig. 10 – List of PSO’s Rescue Teams
(4) In Fig. 10, when the operator select “Team 1”, a push
notification is sent instructing Team 1 leader to route to the
accident location as shown in Fig. 11.
Fig. 11 – Accident’s Location Sent to the Rescue Team Leader
Fig. 12 – Routing from Team Location to Accident
Fig. 12 shows the track that the team must traverse to reach
the accident location.
Performance
The load on the server is not considered as enormous as the
number of transactions is limited to the number of accidents
during a period of time. Therefore, the number of reporting is
not immense comparing to any normal application in the
market. In the alternative where the passenger information is
stored in the car, the number of transactions will be even
lower.
Regarding faulty alarms delivered by the sensor, at least three
alarms should be sent to confirm the accident. If one alarm is
sent, then it is considered as faulty alarm.
VII. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we proposed and implemented an IoT system
which may help the community decreasing the death rates
resulting from vehicles accidents. Results showed that this
solution provided many advantages compared to traditional
systems, namely, minimizing injured passengers interaction,
providing basic medical information to rescue teams,
recognizing exact and accurate accidents locations, and
facilitating the routing process. Reliability test showed that the
system is robust, that is, available and serviceable specially
when the IoT device keeps sending continuous notification of
crash occurrence until it makes sure its reception by the
headquarter as shown in Fig. 1. Also the data collected from
this system can be fed to data mining engine and hence, can
serve the PSO in generating statistical reports related to the
number of accidents, number of injured, bank of blood donors,
and road conditions. Our future vision is to enhance the
system and push forward toward integrating it into each
vehicle during the manufacturing phase. Also, this system
could be managed to get passenger information using a
primary key like the Social Security Number (SSN) from a
governmental centralized database.
 2016 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology (IMCET)

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